CONSEQUENCES OF THE HIGHER EDUCATION QUALIFICATIONS SUB-FRAMEWORK (HEQSF) ON WORKPLACE-BASED LEARNING (WPL) IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN CONTEXT

The South African Higher Education Qualifications Sub-Framework (HEQSF) was signed by the Minister of Higher Education in January 2013 and as a result all Higher Education Institutions (HEI’s) are obliged to align their current learning programmes and/or curriculate new learning programmes for compliance. This sub-framework provides for a 240 as well as a 360 credit Diploma of which the latter may have some workplaced-based learning (WPL) component. However, institutions opting to curriculate a 360 credit Diploma with a workplace-based learning component must guarantee the learner placement in industry and in addition meet the requirements of the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) for such training.

Currently, institutions offering a 3 year Diploma are not compeled to provide learners such guarantees for their workplace-based learning components that spans over one year, i.e. one third of the full study period. In light of the above, our present industrial partners were requested to partake in a survey by completing a questionnaire in order to ascertain the importance and/or relevance of these workplace-based learning components. The conclusion from this study indicates that the vast majority of respondants were in favour of workplace-based learning as part of the formal curriculum as they consider it as being beneficial to both the learner and employer. However, the consequences is that many HEI’s will steer away from curriculating the 360 credit Diploma because of the constraints imposed by the HEQSF.